Source based work on Stalin.

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Introduction

GCSE HISTORY COURSEWORK 2. F) It is very difficult to judge whether he was a monster of not, the argument is strong for both sides of the argument. I will use the evidence provided about Stalin in the sources provided and my own knowledge to come up with a statement that I think would be a fair judgment. To facilitate the comparison of the sources, I have grouped the sources that have similar origins together so that it is possible to observe both the positive sides of the man. First the sources that come from the people who had been working with Stalin and were his close allies for a period of time, these sources would be the most reliable from all the sources, although there is a degree of personal view involved in these sources. Source F, a speech of Bukharin, had said that Stalin will not let anyone who is better than him live, because the men remand Stalin that he is not the best and first. This source had shown that level of injustice in Russian under the rule of Stalin, who was a tyrant and malicious man. I would consider that this source had provided some useful information about Stalin, not only because Bukharin had been working with Stalin for many years, and the speech was made in 1936, before the purges of Bukharin but after the start of the great purges between 1934 to 1938 that the nature of Stalin can be seen quite clearly by his close comrades. ...read more.

Middle

course in 1935 when the writing was published, many people lived in the horror of the NKVD, the secrete police of Stalin, that if one had anything against Stalin then the man was for it! It was also known that although the industry out put dramatically increased, the production of consumer goods was still little and had not been improved since the come to power of Khrushchev, the living conditions were still poor for the workers, especially in housing, and only a little was improved until the late 30s. I think that source E could be a special case, or it is more likely to be another piece of propaganda. Source K instead had said how much love Stalin had for the people and how good of a leader he was. Again this was not true referring to my own knowledge that Stalin set up the labour camps where extreme work had to be carried out, many died during the building of the constructions. Many of the good qualities described in Stalin I agree to a certain extent, e.g. Stalin was described as brilliant military commander, and his victory when defending Stalingrad was well known and Russia's effort to defeat Hitler cannot be denied. But on the other hand Stalin's tactics had coasted Russia with the largest by far the number of death, which would have lowered his rating. Even though many good qualities of Stalin was shown in Source E and K, but because of the reliability of the evidence provided by these two sources, they cannot be trusted easily. ...read more.

Conclusion

It would be difficult to test these descriptions of Stalin because the Stalin had shown good will to improve Russia but the method was in humiliating, and Stalin was also a murderer who killed those challenged him; the balance on each side I have felt as very much equal although from many reliable sources that Stalin was a monster. I quite agree with source L that Stalin was a good politician, who had contributed a lot to Russia, but he was also a malicious man who got rid of all that got in his way, after all Stalin is "the man of steel". But source M had a different interpretation to source L that Stalin was corrupted by absolute power and make men believe in him. I think that Stalin did want the absolute power, which does not make him a bad man, but his methods to achieve his targets were often rootless. The fact that Stalin had kept men obedient did stop people knowing the truth, but will also give more motivation to the people because they would listen to the man that they admired so much from the mass of propagandas. On the whole the things that Stalin done that made the people suffer in fact lasted a shorter period of time, that people were not horrified after the death of Stalin, but the industrialization that Stalin had done, benefited Russia for decays, most obviously in the Second World War. Now it is possible to conclude that Stalin was a man, not a monster, although he did have part of both within him. ...read more.

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